Submissions open for Winter Stations and Ice Breakers competitions

Sister design competitions Ice Breakers and Winter Stations are once again opening up an international design competition to bring temporary public art installations to Toronto’s Waterfront.

Winter Stations, now heading into it’s fifth year, will include up to five lifeguard stands, including an additional two by invited universities, across Ashbridges Bay beaches located in the heart of the Beach community, south of Queen Street East, between Woodbine and Victoria Park Avenues. These utilitarian structures are to be used as the armature for temporary installations, which will need to be able to withstand the rigours of Toronto winter weather. The exhibition is to run February 18 until April 1, 2019.

This is a single-stage open international competition, welcoming artists, designers, architects and landscape architects to submit concept proposals for WinterStations’ temporary artwork installations.

This year’s Winter Stations theme, MIGRATION, is a call to artists and designers to to explore the many facets of migration, including the complex social issues that surround humanity’s shaping of our global society or the flight of animals or the exchange of ideas. Ultimately, migration is a story, much of it yet to be told.

Sister competition Ice Breakers, held in partnership with Ports Toronto and the Waterfront BIA, is also receiving submissions. Ice Breakers is seeking proposals for temporary art works to produce and exhibit along Toronto’s Queens Quay for Winter 2019. This year, we they Ice Breakers jury will be selecting four unique installations as well as one invited University installation for five unique sites which will be exhibited from January 17, 2019 until March 03, 2019.

For Ice Breaker’s third year the theme is “Signal Transmission”. The theme is open to interpretation, but may be approached as an exploration of data, digital and analog communication, including the various modes and codes involved; it may also veer into the realm of biology, ecology and sociology. Simply, Signal Transmission is about how humans and other species speak – to each other and to our self, internally.